Monday, April 27, 2015

NYTimes | Alysia Thomas, a stay-at-home mother in this working-class city, tells
her children to skip a bath on days when they do not play outside; that
holds down the water bill. Lillian Barrera, a housekeeper who travels 25
miles to clean homes in Beverly Hills, serves dinner to her family on
paper plates for much the same reason. In the fourth year of a severe
drought, conservation is a fine thing, but in this Southern California
community, saving water means saving money.

The challenge of California’s drought is starkly different in Cowan
Heights, a lush oasis of wealth and comfort 30 miles east of here. That
is where Peter L. Himber, a pediatric neurologist, has decided to stop
watering the gently sloping hillside that he spent $100,000 to turn into
a green California paradise, seeding it with a carpet of rich native
grass and installing a sprinkler system fit for a golf course. But that
is also where homeowners like John Sears, a retired food-company
executive, bristle with defiance at the prospect of mandatory cuts in
water use.

“This is a high fire-risk area,” Mr. Sears said. “If we cut back 35
percent and all these homes just let everything go, what’s green will
turn brown. Tell me how the fire risk will increase.”

The
fierce drought that is gripping the West — and the imminent prospect of
rationing and steep water price increases in California — is sharpening
the deep economic divide in this state, illustrating parallel worlds in
which wealthy communities guzzle water as poorer neighbors conserve by
necessity. The daily water consumption rate was 572.4 gallons per person
in Cowan Heights from July through September 2014, the hot and dry
summer months California used to calculate community-by-community water rationing orders; it was 63.6 gallons per person in Compton during that same period.

Now,
California is trying to turn that dynamic on its head, forcing the
state’s biggest water users, which include some of the wealthiest
communities, to bear the brunt of the statewide 25 percent cut in urban
water consumption ordered by Gov. Jerry Brown. Cowan Heights is facing a
36 percent cut in its water use, compared with 8 percent for Compton.

Getting back to the fucking point. We do a cellular scan on you, run through the sieve, and lo. You are a mosaic. You aid and abet cells not of your germline. Some of them are eye kew seventy five. You monstrous commie. But you are not a freak. Everybody is. DNA is just books in a library in town. There's a whole countryside, a continent outside of all that. Why is that so hard to get?

Isn't this really just the evolutionist wanting a seat at the social engineering table. Now he materialist can talk about symbolic representation and cultural evolution. "EJ: Things can be learned in very different ways. When you have symbolic representation and transmission, you have the ability to combine things that do not belong just to the here and now. This is one of the great things that symbols allow you to do. They allow you to think about futures and about imaginary or non-imaginary pasts. You can engineer the future, if you want, through this kind of symbolic communication and representation. You can’t do it with social learning that is not symbol-based."

---The materialist is no longer is limited to being materialist.

Maybe someday the materialist will crack the code as to how to make what they say sacred..."DSW: Also, there are levels of description that don’t go all the way down to the neurobiological level. On some of our own work, we’re thinking about, for example, of sacred texts as like a cultural genome. Why is that? There’s high-fidelity replication. Sacred texts are taken seriously. They tend to translate into action. They have many components to them that are deferentially invoked in response to the environment, so that different parts of the Bible, for example, are expressed under different circumstances. You have an expression and a phenotypic consequence kind of thing. That’s a mechanistic description, which is still not all the way down, but we’re finding it very useful to be thinking about culture that explicitly, as an inheritance system, as an evolutionary process.

Its a tough nut to crack...How can the materialist make his word sacred and taken seriously? Maybe this is a good start. But let's say for your personal social engineering, trying to make sure you have the right environment to give yourself and your offspring the best chance for healthy evolutionary advancement, how will the newly found materialist give us anymore wisdom than this the scripture in Psalms 1?

lol, you and a bunch of other crusty old racist impotents may have your lips poked out for while, but your merits and worth have already been weighed on the general utility scale and found to be of little consequence. The system will not only tolerate this behavior, it will reconfigure iniquitous aspects of its operations in response to this behavior.

So keep your bottom lip poked out and your hands on your hips for as long as you like.

Our alphabets are symbols. You can say Jack Kirby and Isaac Asimov have successfully combined symbolic representation and transmission. With that said, much of our social learning is symbol based. If you watch tv, you're getting the kind of symbol based education the creators want you to have. It's no accident that you want whatever's being advertised. If you watch enough of it, you'll learn racism, sexism, and who the bad guys are. They've done a good job keeping people in line.

You ever read any philosophy? Well, if not I'll suggest a little Plato to start out. Did you ever read the Thaetetus I posted a long time back? It's not about believing what he's saying, it's about questioning your beliefs and what you know. I even posted a Freire PDF on this site.